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Expletive subject clitics (ESCs) are pronominal elements that occur in impersonal contexts with which no individual reference is associated. Their presence strikingly distinguishes northern Italo-Romance varieties from standard Italian. We target this structural incongruence by studying the occurrence of ESCs in present-day Opitergino, a virtually unstudied Venetan variety. We explore the question of whether, in the wake of a profound transformation in the sociolinguistic environment that occurred between the first half of the 20th century and early 2020 years, the contact between Opitergino and now-dominant Italian has induced change in the Opitergino ESC system. To test whether change has occurred and to what extent, we compare the results of an extensive online survey we conducted in 2022 with the baseline rules we extracted from speakers born before 1942. We observe that while the system is overall stable, a thread of change is ongoing and manifests in (a) rule weakening in declaratives and (b) erosion of the obligatoriness of ESCs in interrogatives. We argue that this change is likely to be an effect of contact, resulting in structural convergence but not in loss, and affected the part of the ESC system that features more optionality, namely, the domain of declarative clauses.

The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The result of a centuries long process of lexical and structural convergence as been referred to as a ‘sprachbund’. While widely applied, this notion has, however, increasingly been questioned with respect to its usefulness. Addressing the linguistic makeup of the Balkan languages, the notion of sprachbund is critically assessed. It is shown that a) the Balkan languages and the Balkan linguistic exclaves (Albanian and Greek spoken on the Italian peninsula) share similar contact-induced phenomena, and b) the principal processes underlying the development of the Balkan languages are borrowing and reanalysis, two fundamental and general mechanisms of language change.

This chapter addresses simplification and complexification in the morphology and morphosyntax of Wolof noun classes. Simplification, compared with its closest Atlantic cognates, is well known to have occurred in Wolof as a whole, ever since its earliest attestations. In addition, urban Wolof further simplifies noun classes which is partly due to the particular dynamics of linguistic prestige in the Wolophone community. What went unnoticed until recently is that at the same time also complexification took place locally in some spots of the grammatical system, with the rise of morphological irregularity (overabundance) in some noun paradigms and of defectiveness and other irregularities, for some noun classes, in the paradigm of the indefinite article.

Numerical cognition is an essential component of our daily life. It is the ability to process numerical quantities. In language, symbolic representations of numerical quantities are encoded by numerals. In situations of language contact, numerals are often borrowed from one language into another (Haspelmath & Tadmor, Loanwords in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2009), and it has been observed that high and more abstract numerals are more prone to borrowing than lower numerals (Matras, Yaron, Language contact (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009: 202). Linguists mainly explain the higher borrowability of high numerals in sociocultural terms, for example, because of “their association with formal contexts of use” and “through intensification of economic activity” (Matras, Yaron, Language contact (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009: 200). We propose an alternative explanation, informed by cognitive science, showing that low numerals are more resistant to borrowing than high numerals because they are more deeply anchored in cognition.

The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The result of a centuries long process of lexical and structural convergence has been referred to as a ‘sprachbund’. While widely applied, this notion has, however, increasingly been questioned with respect to its usefulness. Addressing the linguistic makeup of the Balkan languages, the notion of sprachbund is critically assessed. It is shown that a) the Balkan languages and the Balkan linguistic exclaves (Albanian and Greek spoken on the Italian peninsula) share similar contact-induced phenomena, and b) the principal processes underlying the development of the Balkan languages are borrowing and reanalysis, two fundamental and general mechanisms of language change.

The paper provides the first description of the borrowing of Croatian collective numerals into Northern Istro-Romanian and explores the consequences of this borrowing for the morphosyntax of the recipient language. It argues that the collective numerals under examination, which are specified as nominative plural feminine in the Slavic model, took on a different structural specification in the Romance replica, in a way that led to a restructuring of the morphosyntactic system, introducing (sub)gender overdifferentiation on just two agreement targets and, thereby, a complexification in this area of grammar. The illustration of this change is placed against the background of the other contact-induced changes that grammatical gender has undergone in Istro-Romanian during the 20th century, which have led to the borrowing of two dedicated forms in distinct inflectional cells and the rise of two separate defective gender values, each the replica of one number value of the Slavic neuter.

This chapter focuses on a wide range of phenomena occurring under the heading of contact-induced morphological change, including several degrees of morphological integration, non-integration ($qua$ indeclinability or maintenance of original markers), and borrowing. It also discusses three major types of mechanisms leading to morphological borrowing: ‘macro-mechanisms’ are general psycholinguistic mechanisms of transfer conceived in terms of source language vs. recipient language agentivity; ‘meso-mechanisms’ are conscious and unconscious techniques which are responsible for contact-induced language change, such as ‘Trojan horse structures’; ‘micro-mechanisms’ are local, concrete mechanisms, such as reborrowing and reanalysis. Cross-linguistic data are presented and discussed in light of the implications that contact-induced morphological change has for the theory of morphology.

The way in which the bilingual’s two languages can co-exist and interact with each other is crucial for the study of language coactivation. This question has been tackled from the perspective of experimental psycholinguistics and that of language contact which can be brought together in the light of different, yet concomitant evidence related to multiple interactions between words from the two languages. Most of these interactions can be accounted for in terms of common and/or parallel morphological representations between the two languages. The two masked priming experiments using cross-script materials reported in this chapter corroborate and extend this hypothesis by showing that different ‘levels’ of morphological and/or etymological relatedness underlie different priming effects. The morphological priming pattern reflects an organisation of the lexicon based on ‘cross-language derivational families’, whereby morphologically complex L1 words automatically activate their base word in L2. Evidence that the opposite is not true suggests the existence of a looser link between L2 words and representations at the semantic-conceptual level, while still being compatible with evidence that translation primes induce significant effects in both L2-to-L1 and L1-to-L2 directions. Evidence from language contact supports the idea that the two languages do not behave in a strictly symmetric way. The more tenuous link between L2 vocabulary and a morphological/conceptual level is mirrored by the morphological integration of loan words into a matrix language, as a significant, preliminary step in the direction of a full conceptual integration. Further data from morphological integration in accordance with the cross-language priming data point to a view of the bilingual lexicon as a unified lexico-semantic architecture.

Morphological inventories and structures of languages in contact can converge by means of either increasing formal similarity (MAT borrowing), or structural congruence (PAT borrowing), or a combination of both (MAT&PAT borrowing). In order to understand whether and how these borrowing types covary with specific grammatical features and modules of grammar, I propose a typology of MAT and PAT borrowing that distinguishes between functional and realization levels and covers all areas of grammar that can be affected by borrowing. I exemplify selected subtypes of borrowing with a number of crosslinguistic cases focusing on morphology and morphosyntax.